Leveraging the power of large language models to rapidly deliver tailored marketing and sales materials
The Lenovo Studio AI solution guides marketing and sales teams through the content-creation process, enabling them to deliver high-quality materials to IT decision-makers within hours and create assets for new products up to eight times faster than previous processes.
Challenge: Helping Prospects Make Informed Decisions
Across all industries, technology decision-makers are searching for IT solutions to help them achieve their business goals. Marketing and sales materials such as product data sheets, brochures, and presentation decks all play an important role in the decision-making process.
Naturally, enterprises want to determine whether a potential IT solution will be a good fit for their specific needs before committing to buy. For that reason, industry-specific content can play a valuable role in helping businesses assess the suitability of a new solution.
Lenovo knows just how important it is to equip decision-makers with the information they need to make optimal technology choices. By leveraging the latest advances in generative AI, we’ve created Lenovo Studio AI: an intelligent, automated platform that will enable teams across Lenovo to generate and deliver targeted, high-quality content to decision-makers faster than ever.
Thousands of marketing assets to manage, navigate and update
26,000 hours a year spent on content management
Challenge: Manual content creation adds lead time
In the past, Lenovo relied heavily on manual processes to create and disseminate content. To promote the benefits of Lenovo technology to prospective clients, marketing and sales teams would typically either write the required content themselves or brief an external agency.
Alberto Sandoval, Executive Director, Product Marketing, Solutions and Services at Lenovo, says: “Whether our team engaged an external resource or did the work in-house, they essentially faced the same challenge: a relatively long lead time between identifying an opportunity and presenting to the prospective customer. We already had a mature digital asset management [DAM] platform with a wealth of high-quality content, but our sales teams were only leveraging a tiny fraction of what was available. So, we looked for a way to convert our rich content quickly into compelling—and targeted—new assets.”
Solution: Lenovo Powers Lenovo
To realize its vision, Lenovo decided to unlock the power of AI. By adopting large-language models (LLMs), the company realized that it could ingest and process marketing content briefs and generate original content in real time—empowering Lenovo’s employees and global business partners to rapidly serve up compelling insights and proof-points.
Roman Olney, Head of Global Customer Enablement, elaborates: “We set out to streamline content production across Lenovo: making it faster, lower-cost, and more efficient. Our first objective was to create an AI solution that could take a request written in natural language—for example: ‘a product brochure for edge computing solutions in the healthcare sector in North America’—and create the asset based on that marketing brief. Looking ahead, we want to go even further by enabling the solution to recombine existing AI-created assets into new marketing and sales content.”
Solution: Four Pillars of AI Readiness
Pillar 1: Security
- Mitigated the business risk of AI revealing confidential information by working to ensure that all personally identifiable information (PII) is anonymized using differential privacy algorithms before it is shared with LMMs.
- Limited the potential for AI to deliver incorrect information through rigorous prompt engineering and the incorporation of mandatory human reviews into the content-generation process.
- Reduced the potential for vendor lock-in by developing an LLM-agnostic platform, overlaid with additional resiliency and security capabilities.
Pillar 2: People
- Engaged future users of the new AI solution from the outset with a thorough change management program.
- Clearly communicated to all stakeholders that the goal of the project is not to remove human beings from the creative process, but rather to alleviate the burden of repetitive tasks and deliver content faster.
Pillar 3: Technology
- Accelerated development and reduced operational costs by building the new solution on multiple LLM platforms from different third-party providers.
- Developed a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) architecture for model training, with internal Lenovo data sources loaded into vector databases.
- Reduced dependance on any single LLM platform by hosting proprietary information on-premises at Lenovo data centers.
Pillar 4: Processes
- Developed an intuitive, user-friendly interface that minimizes training requirements and streamlines user-adoption.
- Clearly defined user roles and rights, with different levels of permissions for marketers, sellers and system administrators.
Roman Olney comments: “It’s vital to have the appropriate controls and guardrails in place to ensure that AI-generated content meets the requirements of the global Lenovo brand. For that reason, the user interface is one of the most critical components of Lenovo Studio AI.”
Solution: Embracing an AI-Powered Approach
Lenovo set out a clear roadmap for the Lenovo Studio AI project, beginning with training the LMMs, designing content-creation workflows, and engaging with marketing teams to help them start developing content on the platform. Currently, over 11,500 Lenovo sellers and partners use Lenovo Studio AI to build tailored, industry-specific content.
“We recently completed a successful proof-of-concept for Lenovo Studio AI, and we’re now moving into the adoption phase,” confirms Olney. “As adoption takes off, we expect hundreds more marketing users to start using Lenovo Studio AI.”
Result: Revolutionizing Content Creation
While Lenovo’s journey with Lenovo Studio AI is just beginning, the solution promises to revolutionize our approach to customer engagement by creating highly personalized and relevant content.
“We want to clearly communicate to potential customers how Lenovo can help solve their technology challenges—and the more we can make that content relevant to their situation, the more impactful it will be,” says Sandoval. “With Lenovo Studio AI, we create original content based on a simple prompt from a Lenovo marketer. Crucially, the solution can perform this work in seconds, which frees our teams to focus on value-added activities.”
Result: Serving Up High-Quality Content Rapidly
Lenovo anticipates that Lenovo Studio AI will deliver transformative benefits to stakeholders across the business and beyond. While the manual approach to content development typically takes several weeks, the AI-powered method can help teams move from an idea to an approved deliverable in days or even hours.
“Based on our current trajectory, we see that Lenovo Studio AI could reduce the cost of a new product launch by as much as 70%,” confirms Sandoval. “Developing assets for new product launches could be much faster with Lenovo Studio AI, too—up to eight times quicker than today. Instead of a four-week process where I raise a PO, select and brief a vendor, and move through several stages of content reviews, I can create and refine marketing materials in real time.”
Result: Supporting the End-to-End Process
Lenovo Studio AI is designed to support the content creation process from end to end, including the final layout of the assets. The solution includes a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, where marketers can add graphics and images and experiment with different designs.
Olney explains: “Using straightforward text prompts, our teams can rapidly create compelling content and see it presented in a variety of formats—for example, as a presentation deck or a brochure. Marketers can change out the images and regenerate portions of the text as they see fit, and then submit the final asset to a human reviewer for approval to release externally. Lenovo Studio AI makes content creation fast and easy, so we can focus on what counts: the customer.”
Accelerates content creation from weeks to hours
Shrinks cost of product launches by up to 70%
Creates content for new product launches up to 8x faster
To find out how you could benefit from Lenovo’s experience and AI-powered solutions to enhance your approach to customer communications, visit Lenovo.com or speak to your Lenovo contact.
